CNS Continues To Shill For Oil Industry Lobbyists

CNSNews.com has been a reliable shill for the oil industry, and it coninues to be one for the purpose of attacking President Biden. Susan Jones served as stenographer for the oil industry’s lobbying group in an Oct. 5 article:

News that OPEC+ has cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day is “really bad news for American consumers,” an oil industry executive told Fox News on Wednesday.

“Well, no one should be cheering this news,” said Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute. “But the truth of the matter is that dependency on foreign countries for American oil and gas is a choice. And it’s a choice this administration has made repeatedly, unfortunately, with the policies that they have pursued so far.”

News of the OPEC production cut comes just as record releases from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve — ordered by President Biden — have stopped.

[…]

Sommers told Fox News, “We should be looking under our feet for the resources that we have here. We can produce these products here. We can share these products throughout the world during a time of war. We have that choice. And we can do it.”

Jones helped API go on the attack against Biden for calling out excessive oil industry profits in a Nov. 1 article:

President Joe Biden, a lifelong politician with no background in running a business, is once again blasting oil companies, even threatening them, for earning large profits.

“I think it’s outrageous what their — the — the size of the profit,” Biden said on Monday:

[…]

The American Petroleum Industry issued the following statement in response:

“Rather than taking credit for price declines and shifting blame for price increases, the Biden administration should get serious about addressing the supply and demand imbalance that has caused higher gas prices and created long-term energy challenges.

“Today, the President proposed to raise taxes on the U.S. natural gas and oil industry that is competing globally to produce the fuels Americans need every single day. Oil companies do not set prices—global commodities markets do.

“Increasing taxes on American energy discourages investment in new production, which is the exact opposite of what is needed. American families and businesses are looking to lawmakers for solutions, not campaign rhetoric.”

“Analysis of a windfall profits tax established in 1980 have found that it decreased domestic energy production and increased reliance on imported oil. According to the Congressional Research Service, the tax reduced domestic production by as much as 8 percent from 1980 to 1988 when it was repealed in part because “it made the United States more dependent on foreign oil.”

What President Biden did not say is that oil companies experienced record losses during the COVID pandemic, when oil prices collapsed.

Jones censored the fact that record oil company profits have far exceeded pandemic-related losses. Rather than going beyond copy-and-pasting a API statement to probe why oil companies aren’t keeping the same profit margins they had pre-pandemic — or even question API’s suggestion that Biden is to blame for higher oil prices — she parroted her employer’s anti-Biden partisan agenda again:

President Biden is a green energy/climate change acolyte. Even during his presidential campaign, he declared his intention to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, which discouraged investment by the oil industry.

In a March 2020 debate, before becoming president, Biden said: “Number one, no more subsidies for fossil fuel industry. No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends, number one.”

As recently as this past May, President Biden hailed higher gas prices as an “incredible transition.”

“When it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” Biden said.

Putting lobbyists and partisan narratives before good journalism is not a good look.